This last weekend, I headed out to Dice Tower West, a popular gaming convention in Las Vegas. While I was there, I was able to spend some time with The Arena, a game table that incorporates a 67″ 4K industrial touchscreen. I’ve already discussed the features of The Arena in my Kickstarter Quick Pick, which I ran at the start of their campaign last month. The concept of a game table that incorporated a touchscreen was already promising, but this was a chance to see if Game Theory Tables could deliver on that promise.
What Is The Arena?
The Arena is a game table from Game Theory Tables for playing tabletop RPGs, digital board games, and traditional board games. It features a commercial-grade 4K touchscreen display incorporated into the table. Covering the display is tempered glass, which resists spills and can also accommodate physical miniatures, boards, and terrain.
Players and Dungeon Masters can connect to the display via multiple methods including WiFi, HDMI, and direct casting from a phone or tablet. There are power outlets and USB ports, and integrated speakers. Bluetooth functionality also allows for adding external speakers.
The Kickstarter Campaign for The Arena is currently running, and will end on Friday, March 15th at 5:00 PM PDT. A standard pledge to reserve one of The Arena tables is $299; the final price for the table will be $5,499 which includes free shipping in the continental United States. There are also discounts available for other tables and accessories which Game Theory Tables have produced.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Hands-On With The Arena
As I’ve mentioned previously, design-wise The Arena is very similar to the Origins Game Table. In addition to the incorporation of the display, there are also six drawers built into the sides of the table. These drawers have a removable divider, and can be used both to store gaming accessories and to double as dice-rolling trays.
Because of the shared design with The Origins, The Arena can also employ the same wood accessories as its predecessor. Some of the newest accessories, which debuted in last year’s Kickstarter campaign for the Origins LIT table, are DM and player stations for use with tabletop roleplaying games.
These stations clamp onto the table and retain rock-solid stability, while at the same time not damaging the table itself. The DM station is naturally larger, as it incorporates a wooden DM screen, as well as having space for books and/or a laptop. The stations also have removable panels, which can be replaced with accessories such as cupholders.
The display of The Arena can be connected to wirelessly, and has an onboard Android system that allows you to download and run apps or use a Chrome internet browser. You can also connect a laptop or a game console to the screen directly via HDMI.
The display itself is covered in tempered glass, so you can place miniatures and terrain on the surface if desired, and even roll dice across it. Though, we were cautioned to not roll metal dice on the surface! In person, the display is bright and vibrant, even under the harsh glare of the lights from the convention center directly overhead. I imagine it would look even better under normal lighting conditions in one’s home.
Gaming On The Arena
While you can play normal board games and digital board games and apps on The Arena, the primary design concept is a wedding of analog and digital for the TTRPG space. As the saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding,” so Game Theory Tables brought out Duke Davis from One Shot Questers to run a short Dungeons & Dragons session on the table. I threw together a 3rd level dwarf cleric, Fjord Fairlane, to join in on the game.
With virtual tabletop (VTT) software running on a laptop, players are able to interact directly with the display. They can move their character tokens around the map, measure distances from their characters to NPCs, or even roll dice digitally. It’s very immersive for the players, and second nature for anyone used to using a touchscreen tablet. Which, at this point, is pretty much everyone!
The 2-hour mini-adventure went flawlessly, with Duke running the encounter on the Tableplop VTT, and all of the players referencing their characters on their phones using D&D Beyond. While it may not appeal to the pen and paper purists, the adventure showed that it can be very enjoyable to incorporate the digital at the physical tabletop. We did encounter a bit of lag on the touchscreen, but that was largely due to the particular Android computer used in the prototype. We were assured that a speedier model was going to be used in the production version of The Arena, to ensure a much faster response time for the touch display.
For anyone that’s run an online roleplaying game before, you know how quick and easy it is to incorporate digital maps into a game. You can use those same resources with The Arena, cutting out the time it takes to do it the old-fashioned way: hand drawing maps onto a grid with a dry-erase marker. With The Arena, you’ll be able to instantly display beautiful interactive maps on your table, allowing you to dispense with some of the busywork of running a TTRPG and focus on the storytelling and the fun.
My time with The Arena made me hungrier to play around more with the table, and find out the extent I could use it with my own TTRPG campaigns. If my players preferred to use painted miniatures as opposed to tokens, it would be easy enough to simply move the digital tokens along with the minis, so that I could still use a VTT program to deal with line of sight, fog of war, spell effects, and other features that the program can handle. The Arena is bursting with potential for the tabletop gamers, and it’s exciting to see where people will go with it.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the The Arena Touchscreen Game Table Kickstarter page!
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